Daily Archives: June 19, 2017

Sometimes you just get a gift. I was hunting dragonflies along the shore of Day Brook Pond on the Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area here in southern Maine, when this immature Cedar Waxwing flew in and landed less than 8 feet from me. I suspect the bird was doing exactly the same thing I was…but with more lethal intent. 🙂 I got the camera up, figuring it was going to fly on at any second, but it sat there and let me take a dozen exposures. I tried to take one step closer, and, of course, it was gone. Still, what a treat.

The setting is ideal. The bird contrasts nicely with the rough patterned white of the birch bark and the background is far enough out of focus to be a lovely buttery green.

You almost never get close enough to resolve the feathers on this bird…in most photos it appears as though carved from wood and with the plumage painted on. It has about the finest feathers over much of its body of any bird out there. The combination of the close approach and the excellent ZEISS len on the Sony Rx10iii make for an exceptional portrait of this bird. The lack of red tips on the wings tells me it is this year’s hatchling, just hunting its first dragonflies on its own.

Sony Rx10iii at 600mm equivalent. Program mode. F4 at 1/250th, and for some reason the camera did not record the ISO setting. I suspect it was ISO 100. Processed in Polarr.